Foreward

Abstract

They [librarians] are subversive. You think they’re just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They’re like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn’t mess with them...” —Michael Moore Originally, the word stereotype was used to describe a method for making a copy of a page of type so that exact duplicates could be made. It wasn’t until 1922 that Walter Lippman first used the word to describe groups of people. Less than a decade later, social scientists had begun to look at the accuracy of stereotypes. Many of these early studies found that overall; stereotypes were “simplistic, inaccurate, [and] not based upon personal contact with a group.”